Very little is known of the life of St. Luke, though many theories have been built up on the subject from the hints given in the Gospels and Epistles. His name is possibly a shortened form of Lucanus. He was a native of Antioch, in his time a center of art and science, and he is said to have acquired much learning there; but whether he was of noble or plebeian origin there is no evidence to show. Some go so far as to assert that he was a slave in a wealthy family, much trusted on account of his knowledge of medicine, whilst others are of opinion that he was a freeman of high descent, who practiced as a physician in his native city.
St. Luke was not an Apostle, and the probability is that be was not converted to Christianity until after the Ascension of Christ. He seems, however, to have fallen early under the influence of St. Paul, who quickly won him to the faith he had himself only just professed, and conceived a warm affection for him, alluding to him in his Epistles as the ‘beloved physician’ and his ‘fellow-laborer.’ St. Luke accompanied his master in many journeys, and during the last years of St. Paul’s life he never left him. He went with him when he was sent as a prisoner from Jerusalem to Rome, and remained with him to the end, sharing the house in which St. Paul dwelt ‘in bonds,’ under the constant surveillance of a guard, enjoying with him his recovered freedom, and remaining with him in his last imprisonment, when he was deserted by the rest of his followers.
After the terrible death of St. Paul, St. Luke is said to have gone to preach the Gospel in Greece and Egypt, but whether he died a natural death or was martyred is uncertain. St. Hippolytus asserts that be was crucified at Elsea, in the Peloponnesus, certain modem commentators adding the detail that his cross was an olive-tree; whilst St. Bede, Baronius, and others say, that though he endured much for the sake of Christ, he died in peace in Bithynia at a great age.
It was in the second century that the name of St. Luke was first associated with the authorship of the Gospel named after him, and with that of the Acts of the Apostles, a portion of which alone is really from his pen. With regard to the former, modem criticism for once endorses the opinion of the ancients, and accepts St. Luke’s own account of his mode of work in the literal sense. He was not an eye-witness of the events he records; he lays no claim to being an original commentator on them; but it seemed good to him, many having taken in hand the record of the past, to give a succinct account of those things most sorely believed by the faithful, even as they were delivers unto him by those ‘which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the truth.’ Working as he did under the direct inspiration of St. Paul, the mode of thought and expression of the disciple are sensibly colored by the influence of the master; but, for all that, St. Luke is a very independent writer, and it is evident that he had sources of information at his command which had not been accessible to St. Matthew or St. Mark, for he gives details of the infancy of Christ not referred to by either of them, and he alone quotes the grand Magnificat of Mary and the beautiful Nunc Dimittis of Simeon.
After his death, however it took place, the body of St. Luke is said to have been buried at Patras, whence it was removed in 397 to Constantinople, where, by order of the Emperor Constantine, it was re-interred in the beautiful Church of the Apostles, built by him. In the time of Justinian, the coffin was opened, and the remains were identified as those of St. Luke. The bones were then to some extent dispersed, and portions are now said to be in the great Greek Monastery on Mount Athos, and in various churches of Italy. The head was taken later to Rome by Gregory the Great, and hy him reverently entombed in the Church of the Monastery of St. Andrew.
The tradition that St. Luke was a physician may be taken to be founded on fact; but it is, unfortunately, otherwise with that, so dear alike to Greek and Roman Catholics, which makes him a skillful painter, whose special delight it was to perpetuate the beauty of the Virgin and her Divine Son. In the early days of the Church painting was considered a religious art, and there seemed nothing unnatural in St. Luke ministering alike to body and mind; healing the sick with his drugs and charming all alike with the beautiful creations of his fancy. It was, indeed, asserted by some that St. Luke was the secretary of the Virgin, who dictated to him the Gospel named after him, and that no imagination was needed on the artist’s part in portraying her features; for she and the Holy Child constantly appeared to him, remaining with him long enough for him to become thoroughly familiar with their appearance. St. Luke is said to have carried with him everywhere two portraits from his own hand: one of the Virgin, the other of Christ, with the aid of which he wrought many miracles, winning also many souls to the true faith; for so transcendent was their beauty that none could look upon them unmoved.
Although it is usually stated that the tradition with regard to St. Luke as a painter did not originate until the eighth, or even the tenth, century, Teodorus Lector, who lived in the sixth, refers to a portrait of the Virgin painted by St. Luke having been sent as a present from Jerusalem to the Empress Pulcheria at Constantinople, which may possibly have been the celebrated image known as the ‘Odégitria,’ taken to Venice from the Eastern capital. Later authors, such as Nicephorus and Metaphrastes, writing, the former in the ninth, the latter in the tenth, century, dwell much on the proficiency of St. Luke with the brush, and their suggestions were to some extent confirmed by the discovery in the Catacombs of a crude drawing of the Virgin, beneath which was inscribed the words, ‘Una ex vii a Lucas depictus,’ or ‘One of seven painted by Luke.’ Some even assert that the actual chapel where the Mother and the Holy Child appeared to the Evangelist is built into the Church of S. Maria m Via Lata, near to which the earliest so-called portrait of the Virgin was found. Several other pictures of a similar kind, but of more skilled workmanship, are also ascribed to St. Luke, of which one is in the chapel at the top of the Santa Scala near S. Giovanni in Laterano, another in S. Maria in Cosmedin, another in S. Maria Maggiore, where it was placed by order of Pope Paul IV. ; and another, said to be the one referred to by Teodorus Lector, is in S. Agostino, all at Rome. In the Church of SS. Domenico e Sisto, in the same city, is a tablet with an inscription, possibly referring to one of these pictures, of which the following is a translation: ‘Here at the high altar is preserved the image of the most blessed Mary, which, being delineated by St. Luke the Evangelist, received its colors and form divinely. This is that image with which St. Gregory the Great as a suppliant purified Rome; and the pestilence being dispelled, the angel messenger of peace, from the summit of the castle of St. Adrian, commanding the Queen of Heaven to rejoice, restored health to the city.’ In the Vatican Library a quaint painting on cloth, ascribed to St. Luke, is preserved, representing the face of Christ surrounded by a nimbus of horseshoe shape. In S. Annunziata, Florence, is a fresco of the Madonna and Child, attributed to Pietro Cavalliere, of which it is related that the face of the Virgin was completed by St. Luke whilst the artist was asleep. In the Cathedral of Siena is yet another painting, exhibited every five years, ascribed to St. Luke; and the Cathedral of Moscow, the Church of St. George at Constantinople, and the Monastery on Mount Athos are all said to own works from the same hand.
As a result of the legends related above, full as they are of poetic suggestion, it became customary amongst Christian artists to associate St. Luke with the Virgin. At first, he was shown acting as her secretary only, but later it became usual to represent him as actually engaged in taking her portrait. In the ‘Chronicle of Nuremberg,’ for instance, dating from the fifteenth century, is a quaint figure of St. Luke at work on a nearly completed group of the Mother and Child, with the winged ox crouching at his feet, the halo of the symbolic creature being much larger than the heads of the figures. Later the same theme was the inspiration of many a great artist: in the Academy of St. Luke, at Rome, is a painting, long erroneously ascribed to Raphael, in which the Evangelist is kneeling at an easel, working eagerly at his picture, with the Holy Mother and Child posing for him, like any ordinary mortals, the clouds supporting them alone suggesting that they are not of this world; and in the Munich Pinacotheka is an oil-painting ascribed to Tan Van Eyck, in which St. Luke, palette in hand, is kneeling at the feet of the Enthroned Madonna. Another charming rendering of the same subject is that by Pinturicchio, in the Church of S. Maria del Popolo, at Rome, in which the easel of the artist is upheld by the bull, who seems fully conscious of the honor of his strange office.
In addition to the ox or calf and the portrait of the Virgin, the chief characteristics given to St. Luke by artists are the various implements of painting, such as the palette and the easel, a book, and a pen, the last not only in allusion to his position p an Evangelist, but also to his supposed secretaryship to the Virgin. In some old calendars the loth of October, the day dedicated to St. Luke in the Roman Catholic Church, is marked by an ox, replaced sometimes by a hatchet, on account of the custom in certain countries of killing on the Evangelist’s fete-day the animals it was not possible to feed in the winter. Occasionally a wooden horse is associated with the beloved physician, but why it seems impossible to say; and he is sometimes seen near a tomb, with two of his disciples, over whom an acolyte is swinging a censer: an allegorical scene, supposed to have reference to the translation of St. Luke’s relics from the place of his death to the Church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople. As a matter of course, St. Luke is the patron of doctors and of artists. It is easy to understand how, by a natural transition, his protection was extended to all who make art a profession, including workers in stone, in marble, or in metal, painters on glass, makers of embroidery, etc.; but that binders, especially those of Flanders, should appeal to him for aid is less easily explained, unless it be because the animal assigned to him as symbol is the ox or calf, calf-skin being largely used in bookbinding.
Paintings and sculptures of St. Luke as an Evangelist are not very numerous, and the most noteworthy examples have already been mentioned in the general account of the writers of the Gospels. To make up for this, however, he appears constantly in the inspiring subjects of the Dispute by the Way and the Supper at Emmaus, which have been so variously interpreted by the great religious masters. Among the most beautiful of these are the two pictures by Luca Signorelli, now in the possession of Mrs. Benson, of London, which were originally portions of a predella from an Italian altar-piece, and are full alike of devotional feeling and dramatic realism; the exquisite ‘Christ as a Pilgrim’ met by St. Luke and Cleophas, who are represented as Dominican monks, by Fra Angelico, in the cloister of the Convent of San Marco, at Florence, which is instinct with religious sentiment; the ‘ Supper at Emmaus,’ by Titian, now in the Louvre, painted for Alessandro Contarini, of Venice ; and the two wonderful pictures by Rembrandt, one in the Louvre and the other in the possession of Madame Jacquemart, of Paris, both remarkable for the beautiful effect of light, which springs from a hidden source, the very halo about the Master’s head seeming a natural, not a supernatural, adjunct. In these fine works the Divinity of Christ shines forth, as it were unconsciously, in the midst of the humblest surroundings. In the picture in the Louvre, St. Luke, who is on the left of the Savior, seems to have just recognized Him, and is gazing at Him with an expression of the greatest affection, whilst Cleophas folds his hands in reverence. In the other rendering one of the pilgrims kneels, the other is seated at the table, with hands upraised in astonishment; and in the background two women are cooking, all unconcerned with what is going on. The Disciples’ journey to Emmaus and the supper there are also among the subjects of the sculptures of the West Front of Chartres Cathedral.
Adapted from: The Saints in Christian Art: The Evangelists, Apostles, and Other Early Saints, By Mrs. Arthur Bell, (London: George Bell & Sons, 1901)